LAMARCK S PHILOSOPHY. 1 13 



existence ; those of a more complex organization only at a 

 later period. The course of the earth's development, and 

 that of its organic inhabitants, was continuous, not inter- 

 rupted by violent revolutions. Life is purely a physical 

 phenomenon. All the phenomena of life depend on 

 mechanical, physical, and chemical causes, which are in- 

 herent in the nature of matter itself The simplest animals 

 and the simplest plants, which stand at the lowest point in 

 the scale of organization, have originated and still originate 

 by spontaneous generation. All animate natural bodies or 

 organisms are subject to the same laws as inanimate natural 

 bodies or anorgana. The ideas and actions of the under- 

 standing are the motional phenomena of the central nervous 

 system. The will is in truth never free. Reason is only a 

 higher degree of development and combination of judg- 

 ments." 



These are indeed astonishingly bold, grand, and far-reach- 

 ing views, and were expressed by Lamarck sixty years ago ; 

 in fact, at a time when their establishment, by a mass of 

 facts, was not nearly as possible as it is in our day. Indeed 

 Lamarck's work is really a complete and strictly monistic 

 (mechanical) system of nature, and all the important general 

 principles of monistic Biology are already enunciated by 

 him : the unity of the active causes in organic and inorganic 

 nature ; the ultimate explanation of these causes in the 

 chemical and physical properties of matter itself; the 

 absence of a special vital power, or of an organic final cause ; 

 the derivation of all organisms from some few, most simple 

 original forms, which have come into existence by spon- 

 taneous generation out of inorganic matter ; the coherent 

 course of the whole earth's history ; the absence of 



